Gaea 4, but why?

 I received an offer of 40% off for pre-ordering Gaea 3. Now this should just pass me by, but the first thing I did when I woke up was watch a video by a 3d creative using Gaea 2. It immediately struck me that the terrain he created was bigger and more detailed than my World Creator output. I decided to finally dive into Gaea and start using it to create terrain heightmaps. That seems a long way from putting up the money for next year's version, but there you go.

I opened Gaea 2, set up a very basic terrain—pretty much a default canyon — and set it to export at 16k. Half an hour later, I was still waiting for the build to finish; it had been stuck at 33% on the second of three tasks. What the hell!? It's going to force me to read some instructions, or at least watch a few videos.

Expect to see some Gaea School posts, right here, right soon.

Lesson 1: When setting up an export to an EXR height map, select all your nodes for export with F3. Otherwise, the export process chugs along, waiting for steps that will not be included. 

Promising, although not revelatory

Sparrow's road

I have more changes to make on the service road rally point. It may entail sculpting more rocks to match the storyboard. I'll then move on to the larger task: the ambush point.

Blender school

CDMCGI has created a really nice texture mixer for ground meshes. He's giving it away for free, although I will definitely go back and tip if it works half as well as it looks.

Noise Texture added to the breakup mask.

Explanation

The tool comes in three parts:

1) The texture mixer panel that accepts four input materials (Materials A, B, C, and D). Note: You must include a displacement in the material that is plugged into the material group output.

2)  The Texture Scaler is a work in progress and will allow the tool to handle larger terrains in future. Still some quirks to iron out. Right now, it handles vector and texture scale for each material.


Adjust the base height of each material so it protrudes through the mix.
In the Material Mixer, you can add noise textures to the breakup mask to stop the resulting ground from looking repetitive. Use a colour ramp to soften the blending. The breakup sharpness slider helps with this. A splat map will work too!

Use the false colour mode to get a better handle on how the mix is applied.

3) A Waterline shader provides a softer shoreline with rings. Works well at high subdivision levels.

Hoping that Blender 5.0.1 comes out soon. Blender 5.0 has been crashing a lot.